Reviewed by Frank McKone
February 4
Photos by Brett Boardman
Andrea Demetriades
Garn! Oh do buy a flower off me, Captain
I have so much to write about this quite startling production that I’m a bit afraid of boring you with my excitement. If this happens, you can take it that I’m rather too much like Professor Henry Higgins – so determined to push through his bet with Kim Gyngell’s genuinely sincere Colonel Pickering, and sooo bored as soon as he saw that his Eliza would pass as a duchess at the garden party. Everyone in the audience was absolutely on Andrea Demetriades’ side when she threw the precisely aimed slippers at Marco Chiappi, even including boring old farts like me. Actually I have a suspicion they were meant to miss and fly off-stage, since Chiappi had to kick one off ready for Eliza's line deadpan “Your slippers.” But we were very satisfied that Demetriades hit her target.
Andrea Demetriades and Marco Chiappi
I knew you'd strike me one day
Bernard Shaw was always a favourite playwright of mine, and now I know why. It’s just wonderful to watch a production where Shaw’s special kind of language is recognised thoroughly, showing that this most popular of his plays is not populist and certainly anything but sentimental. Sentimentality was anathema to Shaw. There is no way Eliza will go back to Higgins, and Peter Evans' direction shows why.
So I am happy that the playwright has been properly respected, because this production shows how his dialogue reveals his characters in the context of their society, and in doing so makes universal the complexities of human relationships which ring as true today as when Pygmalion was written, exactly a century ago. For me, as a long-time student of Shaw’s work, it’s great to see how Pygmalion is an important development in Shaw’s capacity to integrate character and polemics, in a direct line from previous plays like Candida, Arms and the Man and Major Barbara, leading 10 years later to his Nobel Prize winning Saint Joan.
The startling quality of Evans’ work is in using an unencumbered open black stage for a work which traditionally has required a realistic representation of the columns of Covent Garden, the bachelor pad at Wimpole Street, the sensible opulence of Mrs Higgins’ morning room, and on film scenes of a royally appointed ballroom. Instead the design here seems to me to have been strongly influenced by the cartoon-like illustrations by Feliks Topolski done for the Penguin publication of Shaw's original screenplay.
Voice over, video projection and the use of laptop and monitors to represent Higgins’ recording equipment, with furniture and props brought on and off as part of the action, bring this production into the post-modern era. By obviously exposing the fact that this is actors performing on a stage, using modern technical devices, while keeping strictly to Shaw’s original dialogue, Evans focusses our attention on the meanings, implicit and explicit, of what the characters say. The result is that the humour is funnier because the implications (for example of David Woods’ on-the-take Alfred Doolittle complaining about being thrust unwillingly into the middle class instead of retaining the freedom of being ‘undeserving poor’) become apparent on many different levels at once. The same is then true for the clashes between Eliza and Higgins, which reach tragic proportions on this stage. This is no My Fair Lady. More like Heartbreak House.
At interval I talked with Bob Ellis who was doubtful, in his characteristic ennui-style manner, about what seemed to be an unnecessary anachronism of laptop and monitors being referred to by Higgins as a phonograph. By the end of the play, however, as Higgins/Marco pursued Eliza/Andrea backstage with a live video camera, catching just a brief shot of her reflection in her dressing room mirror, I saw the purpose of the modern technology. The mirror image was a symbol built up on screen from the early scene at Wimpole Street when Deborah Kennedy’s incisive Mrs Pearce had reported how Eliza was too embarrassed to see herself naked in the bathroom mirror. The use of video established this as a play of symbols, issues and relationships, creating much more meaning in the drama than I have seen before, but which I have always felt needed to be revealed when reading the script.
With casting – Wendy Hughes as the redoubtable Mrs Higgins, Vanessa Downing as terribly conventional Mrs Eynsford Hill, Harriet Dyer as her daffy daughter Clara, Tom Stokes as love-struck Freddy, as well as Deborah Kennedy, David Woods, Kim Gyngell, Marco Chiappi and especially (remember her in Crownies) Andrea Demetriades – being spot-on, costumes exactly right (with modern styles reflecting the intentions of the 1912 originals), lighting, sound and video highly effective, and the visual effects of movement and use of space all working together, I must conclude by saying that I was never even faintly bored – not bloody likely.
The enthusiastic continuing applause supported my feelings, but I didn’t stay for the after-first-night drinks, and didn’t see Bob Ellis again. It would be interesting to know his final thoughts in the dark night.
I want to know what I may take away with me.
I dont want to be accused of stealing.
